izigame.me

Top notch survival horror game, among the best ones, but still way from perfect. I hope that The Bunker will popularize roguelike survival horror subgenre - a mix which seems so natural and perfect, yet which is completely underutilized.
Now, regarding flaws I mentioned. The main flaw is only one, and it's 50% of an issue and 50% of just me and what I hoped this game would have, but here we go:
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- Game is not balanced against saves.
The main gimmick of this amnesia entry - the fuel which grants you temporare redundancy in monster aggressiveness, making exploration much safer. This sounds good on paper, because it is good, but it simply not working against metainformation I have as a player. Time/fuel is a precious resource, which I can save by simply reloading my save after I investigated the location, because all the items and notes and everything will be on the same spot. Even if I'm not the munckin who breaks the game immersion for ingame resources - it still just work like that. You have 120 seconds fuel time. Initial investigation of location takes you 200 seconds, which is brilliant, as you will lose your safety net midway in the location, preferably at unknown part of the location - that's an incredible feeling. After dying, next raid to the location will take you only 100 secs - as you memorized everything. Not great. You didn't want to mess with the game's resource balance, yet involuntarily you just did. Why do we punish players who against all odds complete locations on their first investigation? What could be the solutions to that?
- Randomize items location after each saveload - meh solutuion, as it's still abusable, but whatever.
- Create complex game logic which will calcute whether player advancing location too fast, tweaking stalker's behavior and changing some small elements on location to delay the player - good workaround, but kinda hard to inplement. And it won't fix the issue of having the same room layouts anyway, I know where it's best to hide, on my second try, where to bait stalker to go, etc and I prefer not knowing anything of that as it's much more thrilling, fear of running from chasing beast to the unknown part of location without even knowing whether it's a dead-end - that's the stuff I hope game will be able to provide each and each subsequent playthrough.
- Develop a game around 1 life with iron will mode, full restart on death, no saves, fully random layouts each playthrough.
Easy solution. Nice solution. If you are saying something like "Hey, just delete your safe after each death" - you are missing the point. Game should be DESIGNED with single life in mind. Make beast not instakilling you on touch, or give player some options when beast grabs you - some item which saves from grasps or wasting a bullet to be saved from the beast, you got the idea. Increase the ammunition and resources amount for a little bit - just a little, to accomodate the panicking player losing his only shotgun shot with no more option to reload to get that bullet back. Make hideout spots slightly more powerful, make it more obvious when hiding under the table will work and when it won't, or let me have a chance to escape being damaged if beast grabs me out from under the bed/table. Make beast not really killing you on it's first successful grab, and just locking you in its lair from which you can escape - like in the Forest, that will be a nice kind of spook - player appears in fully uknown location and should traverse back to the safety room. Point is, you are making a horror game, make me be scared of death in addition with being scared of spooky beast, because right now you only have the later. Darkwood made one-life approach just right, and they got shitton of story content, so I believe Frictional is no worse. Do the option checkbox which will enable savings - not the checkbox option which will disable the savings. Disable achievements, hide true endings behind saveless playthrough - stuff like that. Do the meta horror in scarrying your customers from buying the game.
And yeah, full randomization of layout is required. When I start new playthrough - I know exactly where all quest rooms will be, where are their keys, where are other quest items - you need to go full roguelike to achieve greatness.
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Okay, some other flaws:
- Too much fuel.
- Brick is too powerful.
- Shotgun is obtained waaay too late. Cutters as well.
- All bottles are empty.
- "Safe room is no longer safe in shell shock mode" - said Dumbledore calmly while staying in the locked fully safe generator room while playing shell shocked mode.
Thank you, buy this and bye